In The Feedbox

One of my favorite Looney Tunes cartoons from years ago is a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon that tells the story of when Foghorn woos Miss Prissy the hen in order to have a nice place to call home and keep warm in the winter. The plot goes something like this. (Credit Wikipedia for the synopsis. I changed it some to reflect my recall of the story.)

Foghorn reads a newspaper story in the Barnyard News predicting a cold winter. To avoid freezing in his shack, he decides to woo Miss Prissy ("I need your love to keep me warm."), who lives in a warm, cozy cottage across the way. Miss Prissy is flattered by Foghorn's brief courtship, but tells him that, in order to prove his worthiness as her mate, he needs to show that he can be a worthy father to her nerdy son.

The little boy - Egghead Jr., is dressed in a stocking cap and oversized glasses – and would rather read about "Splitting the Fourth Dimension" than engage in typical little boy games. Foghorn, intelligent rooster that he is, catches on to this and sets out to win Miss Prissy’s heart by showing Egghead Jr. how to play various sports games.

They try baseball and flying paper airplanes first. Then they play hide and seek. Foghorn hides in a feedbox. However, Egghead uses a slide rule (anyone younger than 40 won’t know what that is) and determines mathematically that Foghorn is buried in the ground. He uses a shovel to dig a hole, and pries Foghorn out of the hole with the shovel.

Foghorn is totally befuddled at this turn of events, knowing that he hid in the feedbox, not in a hole in the ground. He looks over at the feedbox, however, and decides to not look in it because, “I just might be in there.”

Although it’s a cartoon and is, at least in my mind very funny, on a more serious note, I’ve at times found myself in a situation, wondered how I got there, but decided to not pursue it any further because of what I might find out that I might not want to know. During those times (which have thankfully been few and far between), this cartoon sometimes came to mind as I struggled to make sense of it all, then decided that it wasn’t probably something I really wanted to do.

I’m also reminded, as I write this, of times in the Bible when someone determined to ask God for an answer, then later either regretted it or really didn’t want to know when God did tell him. Habakkuk comes to mind, asking God how long He’s going to be silent and allow all of the sin and corruption in Israel. God ends up telling Habakkuk something that Habakkuk just can’t swallow: God is preparing a nation that is the epitome of evil in the world for an invasion of Israel to provide the appropriate punishment. I wonder if Habakkuk thought to himself that he really shouldn’t have pressed God on the issue and would have been better off not knowing.

Job insisted on his innocence and demanded that God show Himself. When He did, and by the time God was done with Job, he said to God, “I repent in dust and ashes.” Job too may have wished that he never had called God onto the carpet.

You may be able to think of times in your own life when you hesitated to look in the feedbox, so to speak, because you “just might be in there.” There’s nothing wrong with looking in the feedbox. We humans naturally want to know the hows and whys of things and to understand life as much as we are able. And there’s nothing wrong with calling God on the carpet when you don’t understand things. God is big enough to handle your complaints, and as long as you do your complaining in faith and with respect, God will hear you.

Just be prepared for what you're going to find in that feedbox.